How I Eat for Free in NYC Using Python, Automation, AI, and Instagram | Hacker News Reader

How I Eat for Free in NYC Using Python, Automation, AI, and Instagram

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227 pointsdlgeek141 comments

I hate these kinds of articles. If you are willing to do morally gray things, there are all sorts of "life hacks" you can use to take advantage of people and companies.

It's like writing an article about "How I hacked the system to never pay for honey" and then when you read the article, it's like:

"Once a month I buy a sandwich at Chick-Fil-A and then take every single honey condiment packet and stick it in my backpack!"

Like... that's not a life hack, that's just taking advantage of someone's goodwill for personal gain.

Its not really taking advantage when you advertise the business though

It's taking advantage of the system overall, because it's based on abusing the trust implied by the rating system.

As a user, I'm reading a positive review of a place and I'm unaware this review was posted in exchange for a free meal (in other words, bought).

This is what bothers me the second-most about the whole Influencer system.

What bothers me the most is how many people see no problem with that, which feels to me like a much bigger problem we have as a society (essentially: the growing disconnect between motive and perceived motive in information distribution and the fact that everyone is OK w that).

i believe not disclosing that you were compensated in some way violated US federal law.

I seem to recall that Kim Kardasian get busted for such.

https://www.ftc.gov/about-ftc/foia/frequently-requested-reco...

Wait but what about what he is doing is unethical? Isn't he promising restaurants a promotion on the instagram page in exchange for a free meal? And aren't the restaurants getting promoted on the page and giving him a free meal? What's morally grey about it?

Uhh, he's taking other people's photos for his own gain. He even thinks crediting them makes it okay, when in fact it works against him by showing that he knows he is stealing.

Forget about all the other morally grey things about this, this is blatant copyright infringement. There truly is no such thing as a free lunch, the content is where 100% of the work and money is, and its completely stolen.

I re-read his article to see if he took steps to work around this. My god, he even seems proud that he directly scrapes from other people's instagram. I would go as far as to report this guy.

I mean, I agree with you philosophically, but he's not stealing their photos - he's re-sharing other people's photos and giving credit back to their pages. This is common Instagram practice - it's essentially a "re-tweet".

If he were copying and pasting the images, that's one thing, but what he's doing has no losers - it amplifies the original user and falls within acceptable instagram practices.

That doesn't mean that I don't feel slimy about the whole thing.

It's a rather common practice on instagram. In the absence of some sort of official "retweet" mechanic, this is what people have taken to doing. As he mentions in the article, the response is often very positive from the original content creator, since he credits them (and presumably drives traffic to their property).

He is promoting a business to his followers as a place they should patronize without any actual belief that they should patronize it (other than his belief that businesses that pay him should be patronized).

He is behaving honestly with the restaurants but not with his followers. Unless he is actually posting things like:

"Hey, I've never been to Moe's Tavern but they said I could have a free burger if I posted this picture, so here it is. Go check it out! You should totally spend money there. Moe's is awesome!! (at least, they were awesome enough to offer me a burger to type this!!11!!!)"

Ok, I'll accept that. I hadn't wholly considered the relationship with the channels followers.

That's what all so called "influencers" do: selling their followers to a highest bidder. Actually, that's what every advertisement business do.

I wish this craze go wider and wider, so people finally stop believing what they are told from billboards, TV screens and social media apps.

I don't think that agency selling places on bus stops has actually tries any of the promoted products.

I think the difference here is that he is actively making a claim which is based on a completely false premise. I know that Roger Federer gets paid a pretty penny to wear a Rolex, but in every ad for it he is still wearing the Rolex; Golfers swear that they trust ball X or club Y, and even though their equipment has been individually engineered to a point that mine never will, they do head to the golf course using those clubs. Giselle Bundchen never says she actually wears Victoria's Secret underwear; she just has pictures of herself taken in it.

Influencers are regulated by the FTC and have to disclose that they're compensated for the review: https://www.ftc.gov/about-ftc/foia/frequently-requested-reco...

So ethical or not, it's illegal to not disclose.

Isn't that what ad agencies do? And many paid reviewers.

Which is why I hate ads, and most online reviews.

"Homer: You mean the mob only did me a favor to get something in return?? Ohhh, Fat Tony! I will say good day to you, sir!"

I did not read the article, but that is a false dichotomy; most places have at least a few good sides, could be location, could be opening times, could be the music. I do not know what kind of reviews he is offering, but positive reviews do not mean he is lying.

In addition to what several others have said, this has the problem of being a strategy that only works because most people wouldn't do it. If everyone were running bots asking for free meals in exchange for good reviews, no one would bother reading reviews, and consequently, no one would give out free meals.

This isn't complicated. This person is a freeloader. It only works while times are good: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms4713

How is it morally gray? Who exactly is being harmed? What this guy did is the definition of the hacker ethos. I could even make a compelling argument that he's made the world a better place through this project.

Taking content from public accounts to repost without permission for your profit is definitely morally gray.

It's no different than, say, "re-tweeting".

Retweeting/Quote tweeting preserves the source tweet intact.

Sites like Reddit are also profiting off of content produced by other companies such as NYTimes. Companies whom Reddit has certainly not obtained permissions from. Is that morally gray as well?

If the "aggrieved" party in his manufactured controversy are the other content creators on Instagram, shouldn't they be the ones to decide whether his behavior is problematic or not? If the allegedly aggrieved party isn't flagging his account and isn't upset about his behavior, why do uninvolved 3rd parties feel the need to jump in with moral judgements?

It's not manufactured controversy, the biggest accounts who are successful from these aggregation without permission practices are constantly under criticism from the creators whose work they are profiting off. If you think this is "manufactured" google "Fat Jew" or "Fuckjerry" those are 2 Instagram accounts that creators led unfollow protests against because they profit from other's content.

There's a ton of criticism of these practices, it's morally grey at best, I believe it's morally wrong.

It's not hard to see why this upsets creators. There are thousands of actual content creators, artists, comedians, writers, etc working on social media to make a name for themselves and develop a following (or maintain a following, some of the people aggregators steal from are very successful). These people do the hard work of making original content that is interesting. They suffer failure, they launch new projects and ideas and do a ton of hard work. Then the aggregator accounts skim off the top of the entire network, don't pay the creators and end up with thousands to millions in ad money without doing any of the original & difficult creative work. Rip off at scale is far more lucrative than doing the hard work of making original material.

But the lower effort rip off at scale is only possible profiting off of people doing hard work for free.

I googled fatjew and fuckjerry as you suggested. Their entire controversy originated because they reposted other people's content without attribution. That's what made it a valid controversy. That's what makes this a manufactured controversy.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/02/how-instagram-enables...

"Threatened by the backlash, Ostrovsky promised to attribute everything that he posted to its source in the future... Tebele and other meme account admins instituted similar policies, and the controversy died down"

Well, 2 things mainly:

1. Auto scraping other people's photos and reposting is a bit morally gray. He claims he stopped doing this in an edit to the article and now only scrapes royalty free stock photos

2. (Automatically?) posts guaranteed positive reviews for restaurants in exchange for goods (without disclosing this fact?)

It would be one thing if he got a free meal in exchange for an honest review (good or bad). But an automated, guaranteed good review without disclosing you received a free meal is slimy in my book because it breaks down the trust of the review system.

How can you tell if the ratings are from real people or paid bots?

"Cool Movie" was rated two thumbs up by 10/10 critics!!

vs.

"Cool Movie" was rated two thumbs up by 10/10 critics!!*

*All critics were given a free trip to Disneyland in exchange for two thumbs up rating

at least your paying for a sandwich, I feel like this guy is doing the equivalent of using the bathroom at a Chick-Fill-A and then stealing all the honey on the way out

https://xkcd.com/1499/

"Arbitrage"

Scene: Mexican restaurant with free tortilla chips.

Diner, stuffing free chips into his backpack: "_They're_ the ones giving chips away. If they don't see the arbitrage potential, sucks for them."

Caption: In a deep sense, society functions only because we generally avoid taking these people out to dinner.

Alternative text: The invisible hand of the market never texts me back.

The grey area comes from the fact that taking honey packets does not reduce the number of honey packets availble in the bucket at chick-fil-a.

Worse, I read most of the article, but I never found the part where he actually writes the promised review.

I read the whole article and it doesn't talk about that. I hope that it's an honest review.

It's crappy in 3 of the 4 scenarios:

Gets free meal, writes a guaranteed positive review when the food was good. He, the restaurant and other customers win.

Gets free meal, writes a positive review when the food was bad. He and the restaurant win, but other customers get a false review.

Gets free meal, doesn't write a review. He's taken advantage of restaurant's good will.

Gets free meal, writes an honest review that's neutral or negative. He's taken advantage of restaurant's good will, but other customers get a real review.

Yeah I know - pretty much any restaurant can get by with providing a single free meal, but this is about the principle. And shame on the restaurant for attempting to inflate their reviews.

I have no idea, but do newspaper/radio restaurant reviewers pay for meals? I'm not sure how that would be different other than the automation piece?

Usually the publication would pay for it to ensure a fair review and to hide the fact that they are reviewing it, which may skew the results.

He's tagging the original source, so presumably the actual authors get notified, and they can request the photo to be deleted... But obviously most won't, because their photo being shared, benefits them too!

I think this is another entry to the startup version of "homeless or hipster".

If the author is making it public then it's technically White Hat hacking and it's now up to the company (if they care enough) to resolve this exploit which potentially many others are using.

I think he buries the lede that step number one in this endeavor is to entirely unethical. Yes, it turns out that if you take content from others without asking to build a social media following, and then promise to post positive reviews of restaurants to those followers, you can get free meals.

if you care about your content, you should watermark it.

I don't like the idea either.

But I think I can also argue in this case that ethics are contextual. That is, in the culture of social media, likes, follows and shares are currency. What looks unethical from the outside is actually a slick automated version of what's going on on the inside.

If it were that taboo - again within __that__ world - there would be repeated spam complaints and blocks. The irony is, these "stolen" shares increase the value of the brand, not devalue it.

The author addresses that directly:

> Now, none of the content my account posts is owned by me. This is a contested topic — some people seem to think this can lead to some issues. However, if you credit where the content comes from it’s usually not a problem. I’ve never had any issues re-sharing content. In fact, I’ve only had people thank me for sharing their photos. Worst case, someone reports your post and it gets taken down by Instagram. As long as you give credit where credit is due, you should be good.

I’m not a social media lawyer or “ethicist,” so I don’t know how accurate the claim is. For all I know it may be legal as far as copyright law is concerned.

I read that paragraph, which is why I felt he buried the ledge. I think that using someone else's work for your own gain without permission is unethical. It also doesn't address writing fake restaurant reviews.

Blogs have done this for years via a "pingback".

There could be some confusion between "taking" and "sharing"...

He never claims to own the photo.

He credits the original content creator. Additionally, content creators love when their content is shared, because "Someone with an audience of 20k people just shared one of my photos?! #exposure!"

"#exposure!" is the common refrain of the thieves, not the artists.

very true!

Wow. I cannot believe people still think this isn't copyright infringement. Crediting the work of others saves you from plagiarism, it does NOT save you from copyright. Instagram does not have a "pingback" feature. It's literally a copy pasted image, with a link in the description.

A lot of regrammers try to hide the original poster by cutting off watermarks, and jamming the attribution far below the (more) cut off if they even bother with attribution at all.

Really have to love how the HN hivemind can simultaneously defend wholesale intellectual property theft (genlib, piratebay, et al) and claim that copyright law is too strict while getting morally bent out of shape over someone aggregating and curating otherwise low-value instagram posts in order to eat takeout for free.

The lack of moral consistency is astounding.

No, digital information is not the same as a tangible object, so everything, including the morals, is different.

Many people are taking issue with him quote-unquote "stealing" other people's content when he's ostensibly just resharing single images that fit in a broader theme of being vaguely NYC-related. This seems much more defensible as fair use as opposed to rehosting/pirating somebody's entire textbook or TV show.

It's almost as if the "hivemind" isn't a hivemind, but a large set of people with different opinions/morals and different willingness to express it in different contexts.

I am an individual and not a hivemind. I, personally, find piratebay unethical. I pay for what I consume. Paywalled scientific articles are a different beast, which I don't want to get into here.

> The lack of moral consistency is astounding.

Is it? Did you expect all HN users to have exactly the same moral compass?

People can believe that copyright law is too strict while also believing that copying other people work is not moral. Adultery should not be illegal but also should be look at as morally wrong.

Also, the actual harm from downloading one additional episode of game of thrones is nearly non existent. The harm of stealing the photos from individual photographers is surely greater.

Many people believe that it's unethical to use other people's work for profit, at least not without sharing back, which seems to be the case here. It's not inconsistent to believe that, while also believing that non-commercial copyright infringement is not immoral.

Who exactly decided that reposting others' content, with citation, is unethical? The people getting credits are getting an opportunity to grow their follower count and to gain more exposure as well. If they aren't happy with what he's doing, they can certainly flag his account, and Instagram will eventually ban him if he gets flagged too many times.

A lot of the responses here are dripping with envy and sour grapes.

See also this interview with the author, which deconstructs the ethics behind such tactics (with comment from Instagram saying it's blatantly against the ToS): https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/katienotopoulos/automat...

As a data scientist myself (who in disclosure helped fact check a few things for that article), I was surprised he admitting to such hacks in a job portfolio piece as data ethics is a very hot issue lately.

His actions make sense from a game theory perspective. Data ethics is a very hot issue to ethical employers. Unethical employers would be a better fit for him, but do not advertise themselves as unethical. By advertising himself as unethical, he not only filters out ethical employers but offers unethical employers a risk-free way to woo him.

Suggested title: "How I use AI to Target Spam To NY Restaurants"

Well, one persons trash is anothers treasure. While most places probably want ethical, fact is, some do not. Perhaps it's a subtle but effective way of saying he'd work for the darkside?

This seems like a lot of work, and personally, I don't see it as being much more than begging. Sure, it's begging successfully, but it's still begging. Worse, it could be considered a form of fraud. You have no intention of providing real value to your "advertisers".

Maybe I have different values, not having grown up in the US of A, but I don't think I could ever pull off such a disingenuous enterprise.

Edit: OP literally admits to stealing content. I could see something similar to this being more legitimate, but this is not it. (For the record the insta is @beautiful.[redacted] and almost all of the followers are bots)

How is advertising them to tens of thousands of real followers not valuable?

Do we know they are "real" followers?

> Maybe I have different values, not having grown up in the US of A

This gets really, really tiresome after a while.

The value proposition is very clear and not fraudulent or are you saying that stuff build by robots is fraud?

Here's what is being exchanged:

Hi, I have lots of followers (to my knowledge they are not bots themselves) that I can present advertisements to. Many of them are either interested in NYC or located here. Would you like to

Ie: let's exchange visibility (for this target group) for perks.

This is the basis of advertising, just that perks is money. It's not the person asking for money who might be an idiot, it's the person paying if the value provided does not match. And frankly exchanging visibility for perks instead of money is extremely cheap for restaurants. If the value does not match what the restaurant was after, they can not accept such proposals anymore.

There's risk in being in business, you just have to accept that.

> ... not having grown up in the US of A, but I don't think I could ever pull off such a disingenuous enterprise.

Regardless of where we draw the line for "disingenuous," You can't seriously be suggested that only people in the US come up with such schemes. A recent thread (yesterday) on Another Site (I'm sure you've read it - the site, but not the thread) that indicated to me visiting places around the world is a fine way to get fleeced by individuals (locals, not Americans) with disingenuous schemes.

It’s not begging, begging is not immoral. This is stealing.

Huh? The benefit to the restaurant is exactly as promised. The only ethical concern that I see is that all the content is grabbed from other sources (the author claims to give proper attribution).

> In today’s digital age, a large Instagram audience is considered a valuable currency. I had also heard through the grapevine that I could monetize a large following — or in my desired case — use it to have my meals paid for. So I did just that.

> I created an Instagram page that showcased pictures of New York City’s skylines, iconic spots, elegant skyscrapers — you name it. The page has amassed a following of over 25,000 users in the NYC area and it’s still rapidly growing.

> I reach out restaurants in the area either via Instagram’s direct messaging or email and offer to post a positive review in return for a free entree or at least a discount. Almost every restaurant I’ve messaged came back at me with a compensated meal or a gift card. Most places have an allocated marketing budget for these types of things so they were happy to offer me a free dining experience in exchange for a promotion. I’ve ended up giving some of these meals away to my friends and family because at times I had too many queued up to use myself.

> The beauty of this all is that I automated the whole thing. And I mean 100% of it. I wrote code that finds these pictures or videos, makes a caption, adds hashtags, credits where the picture or video comes from, weeds out bad or spammy posts, posts them, follows and unfollows users, likes pictures, monitors my inbox, and most importantly — both direct messages and emails restaurants about a potential promotion. Since its inception, I haven’t even really logged into the account. I spend zero time on it. It’s essentially a robot that operates like a human, but the average viewer can’t tell the difference. And as the programmer, I get to sit back and admire its (and my) work.

That's pretty cool, but has all sorts of Instagram TOS violations. If it gets too big it will get shut down.

From https://help.instagram.com/581066165581870

"You can't attempt to create accounts or access or collect information in unauthorized ways. This includes creating accounts or collecting information in an automated way without our express permission."

How is that a violation? I don’t think the author created the account in an automated way, and the “collection information” clauses are so vague I have no idea what they actually mean.

He literally built a scraper to directly take content from other Instagram pages, and a ML classifier to select what to post. The account is 100% automatically run, he states that he has not logged in since creating the account. I fail to see any way that that isn't a TOS violation.

In today's digital age, comments points are a valuable currency. By simply summarizing or taking a few key quotes a user can provide value to other users of link aggregation websites so they get the serotonin release without the work of clicking all the way through to TFA.

In fairness, it's a 22 minute long article..

Also buried in the article is that likely most of his growth came from doing the follow/unfollow gimmick that people have been doing on Instagram for years. You can pay online services to bot that for your account for $x a month.

It's frustrating on the receiving end, you think someone is following you because of genuine interest for what you have to share, but in reality it's a bot that's trying to scam you into following it back, only to unfollow you soon after. One of the worst aspects of the application, especially now that millions of accounts are all doing that at the same time. The signal to noise ratio is horrible.

Yeah, that's super annoying. As someone with an insta, and as someone who kinda would like to be able to figure out how to get some visibility- surfacing my own content seems to be obscure.

What is the value in unfollowing people? Do accounts that follow a lot of people have less authority?

You have a limit of 7500 people you can follow. Thus if you're going to be spamming following people, you need to unfollow them as well to make room for more follows.

From the article, under "Unfollowing": "You have to unfollow the people you follow for two reasons. The first is that you cannot be following over 7,500 people at any time. The second is because — although artificial — you want to have your follower/following ratio as high as possible as it is a sign of a more desirable account."

Call me skeptical, but I don't believe he automated this to the degree described in the article.

There's no code, some of the technical writing is a bit weird and non-idomatic, and according to the author's GitHub he was just doing very basic boot camp projects 6 months ago.

I'd chalk this up as "boring sci-fi"

If you really don’t care about right and wrong, you should have just bought followers on eBay and posted 1 photo for 30 days and paid for the likes. You’d be done with 1/10th the work and compared to even a low hourly rate, you’d save money.

That seems much easier to argue that it’s unethical. At least in this post, the followers (and thus the benefit to the restaurant in exchange for a free meal) are supposedly real.

I think this brushes against the reason most people do things... you probably could buy your way into a shortcut, but for some people the utility of the time here AND knowing it worked was higher than just paying for the shortcuts known to everyone.

Slightly related since this one is a bit borderline, there should be a community/slack for people experimenting with automation/ml-driven passive income projects. I think it's time.

Would be interested!

Shoot me link if you get one started. :)

Same here :)

Same here. Count me in too. Happy to lead/help this initiative.

And tbh I don't think it needs to be projects that make $money. Any automation/ML based projects that make life easy for the coder should qualify. Eg: A simple Python script I wrote as hobbist helped me build a meme page with 17K fb followers when I was in school. I had no intentions of monetizing it. Just harmless fun.

Actually, this is a pretty incredible starting point to starting an "Influencer as a Service" biz. I've seen one (selfmade.co), which basically an agency that will help manage your Instagram for you, but if you can create tools to help anyone maximize their followers (with AI-suggested captions, tags, who to follow, photo ratings or improvement tips, etc.) I could see that (sadly) being something a lot of people would pay a subscription for.

I've always wanted to do something like this as an experiment - automate everything, including the setup (creating accounts/any hosting) then tie it to a genetic algorithm whose fitness is determine by the amount of money/ad revenue it generates. And I have no control over it at all once it's released, it just reproduces on its own.

My main issue I have with the author's post is not that it's dodgy (it's resourceful and nerdy and the first I've seen of it so it gets a free pass from me!), is that it's really hard to find something that's actually healthy when eating out... unlimited takeout around Hell's Kitchen sounds like a recipe for a heart attack!

Ah, an uncontrollable AI spam bot, nice...

> I wrote code that finds these pictures or videos

ah, so you don't even make the content, you just wrote a content-reposting bot and then set it to automatically catfish restaurants. Behavior like this is why more and more people hate the tech industry every day.

Last I checked, it was a significant pain in the butt to get an API key from Instagram, specifically because they didn't want you doing this sort of thing. Anyone know how he got access to the Instagram API? I've played around with similar methods but ended up using selenium because of the API restrictions of IG

https://github.com/LevPasha/Instagram-API-python

That repo doesn't let you do 100% of the things the OP claimed to do. (e.g. DM automation)

It's got pending PRs that permit DMs. https://github.com/LevPasha/Instagram-API-python/pull/322/fi...

https://www.instagram.com/developer/

It looks like it won't matter soon.

>These capabilities will be disabled immediately (previously set for July 31, 2018 or December 11, 2018 deprecation). The following will be deprecated according to the timeline we shared previously:

>Public Content - all remaining capabilities to read public media on a user's behalf on December 11, 2018

>Basic - to read a user’s own profile info and media in early 2020

It's past December 11th 2018, so some workaround/hack is being used for this workflow.

Yeah I know...I was refering to the 2020 one. In less than a year you won't be able to read your own profile's media or info. It's going to make lots of things difficult I imagine.

It's fairly trivial to get the credentials out of the Instagram app and use the private API the official app uses. As long as you're not being dumb about it like sending a cURL user agent or something, it's fairly hard for Instagram to prevent.

None of this requires an API. You can scrape the web version of IG and obtain everything OP claims.

This thing doesn't seem to be getting much love on here, but I don't have any problem with it - assuming of course that he's actually posting those business pics he said he'd post. Everyone involved is getting something out of it - original photo posters are getting more attention to their work, businesses are getting more exposure and business for what's a trivial cost to them, passive consumers are getting nice pictures and information on things to try.

What it means to society that this is a viable and mildly profitable thing to do is a more interesting question.

> However, if you credit where the content comes from it’s usually not a problem.

This is easiest to say when you're the one stealing content as opposed to the one being stolen from.

I also wonder if he is resharing only Instagram posts or also scraping other sources for images. As a photographer I'd issue a dmca takedown against someone downloading my photo to share it again in theirs. Credit or not! If he asks first it's something else.

No need to wonder, just read the article.

Spoiler: He only uses instagram.

He says specifically in the article that he is only resharing Instagram pictures.

> resharing Instagram pictures

He uses that fluffy language but "resharing" is not an Instagram feature. He wholesale steals images.

That's true, but this is actually normal behavior in the instagram world since it doesn't have the concept of share/retweet. So you screenshot or use some app (ie regram) that re-posts someone's content and credits the original user.

Instagram is full of multi-million follower accounts doing this, it's very much an accepted practice on the platform. If FB wanted to disincentivize this they would, but they haven't.

Look at @lmao or any other "meme account".

The article covers how he sources content in great detail.

I guess he hasn't heard of Richard Liebowitz, who "sues regardless of whether the original photograph would have licensed for $12, $1,200, or $1.20":

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/05/richard-liebowit...

For those asking about API keys - While it makes life easy to have API keys, it's quite easy to just use something like Puppeteer[0] to control it via a Lambda etc.

[0] https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer

"I violated Instagram TOS and I'm telling everybody how I did it in detail, so they can just shut down my account".

https://help.instagram.com/581066165581870

What a shame that someone with some talent is doing something so sketchy and selfish with it.

I wonder how much money he saves by eating for free. I guess you could check his page, see how many restaurants he's "endorsed," and multiply by 15 bucks. I can't imagine it's more than $1000 total.

This would be a great personal advertisement to show off his skills to employers if not for all of the ethically murky rule breaking. I'm sure he could bring this up in an interview to score some points.

In other words, the amount of potential upside is far higher if he just doesn't take the next step of breaking the rules and getting the discount. Instead, just focus on building the account. After all, that's the impressive data-sciency part of this.

Why did he redact the name of the account in red? He doesn't want people to know that it's fully automated?

I think he could have gotten some additional followers with this post.

I would like to see if the content is any good, in addition to being automated ...

Here is the account: https://www.instagram.com/beautiful.newyorkcity/

EDIT: Just banned about an hour after I linked to it in this comment.

Thanks for the link. Looking at the pictures, I probably wouldn't follow it, and I spent last summer in NYC.

The algorithm seems to have a preference for HDR pictures of cityscapes? And then the captions are all very generic / spammy sounding.

It doesn't seem interesting. I don't have anything against following algorithmic content, but it should at least tell me something cool about the picture that I didn't know, etc.

I’m not interested either, but I’m not at all surprised that there are at least 30,000 people who are interested in faux-HDR photos of NYC.

You're assuming that all 30,000 followers are actual people rather than more bots or spam accounts.

Wow. Already banned.

Everyone does this, but IG never cares unless you somehow draw attention to yourself.

Wait, what? That literally just happened.

I suppose Instagram is reading this thread. :p

Probably yeah. Lets see if they'll ban much bigger accounts doing the same thing, I'd guess not.

https://www.instagram.com/lmao/

It's not too much of a stretch to imagine that several Instagram employees are regular HN readers.

It looks like the account has been removed now

looks like instagram took down his account. So no more free food.

In TFA, he says that he created other accounts like this. So if his OPSEC is good enough, he's still getting that free food. This was arguably just a sacrifice to get some publicity. Indeed, I'm guessing that he's selling these bots. Or at least, offering consulting services.

8 days later, it’s unbanned again. I wonder why!

Maybe it's more about not feeling like he's shilling the account, focusing on the methodology instead.

Ironically, if he were to get real users (and begin to post real pics from the restaurants he visits), he may no longer be committing fraud.

I've noticed lots of follow requests from these spammy / scammy sorts of accounts over the last 8-10 months on IG. I finally deleted my account last month and haven't looked back.

Sounds like a social marketing job and he's underpaid.

I actually personally worked with this kid.

Doubt any of this was malicious. I know he did promotions on that account for some restaurants that said they couldn't afford to give away free food.

Incredibly smart and generous. I think he's only about 22 years old, which is mind-boggling he was able to create such a system.

I do understand your concerns about the original posters, though.

Are you him?

Odd. I don't see code for tracking the potential tax liability of all those "free" meals.

Just because you didn't see it - didn't mean he didn't do it.

This guy ought to watch more South Park (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You're_Not_Yelping)

>I will not be providing code or anything like that

Ok, still might be an interesting read from a technical standpoint...

Later on:

>Using some opensource software, I set up a scraper to go through and download media

Seriously? Couldn’t even say which open source software?

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